Highlighting Interaction Designer Zhi Wang

Find yourself a small group of allies first — things will be much easier when you are not fighting alone.

Zhi Wang is an interaction designer that is part of a climate hive at Making Waves, a digital design agency in Oslo, Norway. Originally from Nanning China, she is in her first year of work after getting her master’s degree in Interaction Design at Umeå Institute of Design in Sweden.

What has motivated you to proactively take climate action at the place you work?

I first learned about climate impact when I interned at an agency that focused on bringing sustainability into physical product design, where I learned a lot about the circular economy. However as an interaction designer, I didn’t feel the urgency of taking climate action because I was not working with any physical materials.

When I started at Making Waves, I found that even though the company focuses on digital products, many of my colleagues were passionate about taking climate action in their work and everyday life. The atmosphere kind of pushed me to learn about the relationship between my work, my everyday life and climate change. It turns out that my work style and the digital products I design can have a big impact on the environment. I can no longer “unsee” the elephant in the room anymore since I know it is there, thus I started to take actions in my workplace.

How did you start? What things did you do in your effort?

Some of my colleagues helped me get started by including me in some workshops about climate action at the workplace, where the participants learned about facts about climate change and brainstormed how might we help.

I dug into the topic of Sustainable UX Design and spread that knowledge within the company. A colleague and I are also working on a toolkit to bring in sustainability in Service/Interaction design process.

How did your company and office react?

My company and office are doing an amazing job in reacting to climate-related suggestions from the staff. Colleagues from different departments are always willing to donate their time to help out in climate action initiatives.

What were the outcomes? Were there any changes?

Yes! There are :)

For example, our canteen has started to offer only vegetarian dishes once or twice a week.

Illustration by Zhi Wang

What worked best?

Getting the decision-makers on board early. It is easier to work on climate-related things and execute them when the managers in the company are also committed to the goals.

What did not work so well?

Maybe the execution?

There are many self-initiated activities in the company, but it is not always easy to get things fully executed. It takes time and resources.

What is your advice to someone starting out?

Find yourself a small group of allies first — things will be much easier when you are not fighting alone.

What would you like to see happen in the coming years- what is your wish list for climate action?

It would be nice to have more industry standards, similar to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. I wish there were standards to define how ‘green’ a workplace is and how ‘green’ a digital product is.

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Zhi Wang is the instructor of a masterclass on Sustainability in Digital Design. She can be found at LinkedIn.

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This article was first published on the Hive Initiative Medium account.